[MUD-Dev] The Best Guy on the Mud Thing

[Adam Wiggins]

On Fri, 17 Sep 1999, Chris Turner wrote:
> One of the things that RuneQuest (a table top RPG) does for skills, is to
> only allow them to increase after a period of rest/inactivity.  Maybe
> players who spend less time on could get a slight increase in the skills
> they do use whilst logged on - their characters could be spending the time
> whilst logged off, thinking about what they had learnt recently.  Over time
> the increase could decay, as they slowly forgot about what they had done.
> So if you do a lot of sneaking and then log off for a week, you could come
> back to find you've gotten better at sneaking.  

On MUME, darkies (eg: trolls) were a lot of fun to play, but they rather
sucked during the day, as if they were in sunlight for a single moment they
would instantly turn to stone, thereby permemently killing the character
and destroying all of their equipment.
Good darkies wanted to play all the time, not just during the night, so
when night rolled around, they logged off their troll and logged on
their whitie, until night fell again.

This applies to your idea as such: if a good way to learn skills is using
them for an hour and then logging off for a few days, wouldn't a player
that wanted to play all the time just have a dozen characters, log each
one on for an hour practicing skills, and then go to bed and wake up to
find all his characters vastly improved in their skills?

This relates back to the old fluidity-of-identity and the fact that
there is no good way (unless you're charging money, and even then it's
tough) to ensure that people will not play lots of characters in order to
circumvent game mechanics like this.

Adam





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